High on Aerial Images

I just finished an incredible book by Adriel Heisey, an archaeologist/commercial pilot turned photographer.  After flying at jet speeds over ruins he had explored by foot, he decided he wanted to slow down, so he built his own 30 foot plane.  The engine sits on one half, and he sits on the other, strapped in by his legs to the nose of the plane.  He goes on breathtaking solo flights over the American Southwest, leaning out over the plane for truly stunning shots.

Here's the man himself:

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Below are some images and quotes from From Above: Images of a Storied Land that I found particularly fascinating:

From above, the "land's more naked, more exposed."  A more distanced yet simultaneously intimate perspective

"The ancient landscape is a lesson about change, and the inevitability of change" Leslie Marmon Silko (50)

"We all came from the same place, and we all came out with different languages" Bernard Siquieros (60)

"The past is every bit as gnarly, layered, complex, difficult, ambiguous, paradoxical as the present" (70)

(39)

"At this site, my heart is open--air is flowing through it, and there is no burden" (104)  Architecture and the landscape revitalize, reinvigorate, reinvent, put humanity in context

"Landscapes as the interaction between communities and their environments.  The landscape has many layers across physical spaces, as well as over time" Kurt Anscuetz, Rio Grande anthropologist (44)

(41)

"...then just to walk there, and walk, and walk, in ripples..."  Lucy R. Lippard (46)

"I would say that archaeology is like music and the arts in the sense that the ultimate fate of man does not rest on archaeology.  It's an enriching experience."  Bruce Huckell (52)

(67)

"The fact is, there was never an empty land." "Pristine nature" is a "mythology" (130)

"That is where life is.  It is in the ordinary that you find the profound." (130)

"The way you preserve landscapes is to actively use them." (134)

"We have certain stories that say we are not above other things, but we are equal to them.  Think of water.  People move to a new area because of resources--beauty and water.  In the desert if you do not have enough water, you will die of thirst.  But in the monsoons, if you have too much water, you will drown.  What we need, then, is balance." (135)

(100)

"What I want to encounter is the aroma, the pith, the entirety of place.  The natural dynamic is part of that.  All places are dynamic.  They are all in a creation flux.  But human history of the landscape is also constantly changing and accumulating and that's an equally important component of the richness."  William de Buys (139)

(115)

"The world then, one could imagine, consist not of a single web but many webs, each suspended from one another, laced across geographies as well as through time.  We are linked to one another, to the land on which we depend, to those who have gone before us.  Landscapes are not a single space--as life in modern cities too often leads us to believe--but interwoven and enlaced, a part of our very being."  Chip Colwell-Chanthaponh (143)

(47)